I came here as an immigrant when I was young, and your observations are fairly abstute -- there's a lot of bagage that came over with me and my family. From my experience, I can confirm that immigrant families are much less accepting of diversity than Canadians as a whole.
That much is certainly true, but at the same time I also understand where some of those immigrant kids you describe come from. Growing up in Canada as a kid who spoke no English was an incredibly traumatizing experience for me. Let's face it: kids are fucking assholes. Every day at school I would get bullied or beaten up because I was different, dressed funny, and couldn't speak the language.
It didn't take me long to develop a healthy hatred of my schoolyard tormentors and the larger system that offered little protection or compassion.
If there was some kind of cultural group I could have clinged to for a sense of security, I probably would have done so. I'm sure that many of the kids who join "pseudo-gangs with catchy names" or idiotic jihads do so because life sucks, especially when you are growing up in a strange land where everybody shits on your head 7 days a week.
Thanks for your input Tudor. It's good to hear the perspective of someone who can relate to that experience.
Kids are definitely assholes, and I don't mean to denigrate or deny that immigrant kids have it harder and that some racism does exist here. I guess my overarching point would be that kids are assholes everywhere, and that may certainly be a cause of, but can never be an excuse for, such actions.
One of my fondest memories of middle school was the Russian kid Igor whipping a paintbrush at a kid who made fun of his accent. He didn't get made fun of for his accent after that.
The thing is, one doesn't have to be an immigrant to feel that you're growing up in a strange land where everybody shits on your head. A lot of kids feel that way; I certainly did. You only have to look at say, the Columbine shootings, to see that alienation leading to violence is a universal.
So fundamentally it boils down to: yes, life often sucks and the system often sucks. We all live with that reality to varying degrees. What matters is how you deal with it, and that fundamentally boils down to you and you alone.
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